" Indeed, a great
book is often a greater thing than a great battle. Even works of
fiction have occasionally exercised immense power on society.
Thus Rabelais in France, and Cervantes in Spain, overturned at the
same time the dominion of monkery and chivalry, employing no other
weapons but ridicule, the natural contrast of human terror. The
people laughed, and felt reassured. So 'Telemachus' appeared, and
recalled men back to the harmonies of nature.
"Poets," says Hazlitt, "are a longer-lived race than heroes: they
breathe more of the air of immortality. They survive more entire
in their thoughts and acts. We have all that Virgil or Homer did,
as much as if we had lived at the same time with them. We can
hold their works in our hands, or lay them on our pillows, or put
them to our lips. Scarcely a trace of what the others did is left
upon the earth, so as to be visible to common eyes. The one, the
dead authors, are living men, still breathing and moving in their
writings; the others, the conquerors of the world, are but the
ashes in an urn. The sympathy (so to speak) between thought and
thought is more intimate and vital than that between thought and
action. Thought is linked to thought as flame kindles into flame;
the tribute of admiration to the MANES of departed heroism is like
burning incense in a marble monument. Words, ideas, feelings,
with the progress of time harden into substances: things, bodies,
actions, moulder away, or melt into a sound--into thin air.
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